This is an interesting discussion and hopefully some consensus can be reached. About a year ago I started the Wikipedia page "Table of keyboard shortcuts" to document which keyboard shortcuts are used on the major platforms. I thought it would be best maintained on Wikipedia since it is beneficial if it is reasonably complete also for non-unix platforms. I think it is quite useful as reference by now.
I think it can be argued that Alt does not fully belong to the WM. After all, Alt is the modifier that activates the menu options (such as Alt+F for the file menu). This is at least since the CUA standard was published in 1987, which Windows inherits from. Also, Alt is used as the accesskey in HTML in many browsers, including Firefox. For this reason, Firefox has disabled Alt as menu accesskey on Unix, and it is used as accesskey for the browsed content instead, but still not free for the WM. For this reason I think the main distinction for who should listen for Alt should be between alphanumerical chars and non-alphanumerical chars. That seems to solve the majority of cases. There is still some conflict on Alt+cursor keys though. Apart from this, the following division seems to reflect current practise: For use by WM / Desktop ======================= Modifier Additional Alt non alphanumerical Alt+Shift non alphanumerical Alt mouse Alt+ctrl any Alt+shift any Alt+shift+ctrl any For use by applications ======================= Modifier Additional Alt alphanumerical Alt+Shift alphanumerical Ctrl any Ctrl+Shift any Since Alt already is split, it might be possible to split "ownership" of other modifiers as well? Claes -- C l a e s H o l m e r s o n _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg
